SUSANNAH FELTS is a writer and editor in the American South. Her writing spans fiction, essays, cultural reporting and criticism, and mostly secret poems. In 2014, she cofounded The Porch, a nonprofit literary arts center in Nashville, Tennessee, and is currently its artistic director. She also contributes to creatiive direction and editing for SWING, a biannual literary magazine published by The Porch.
Susannah’s first novel, This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record (Featherproof Books) focused on photography, friendship, and a particular park in late-80s Nashville. Just a few years later (ha — try 18!), she published a second novel, The Come Apart (TriQuarterly Books), the story of an indie-rock musician in Chicago & Nashville in the early aughts.
Her short-form work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, StorySouth, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She is creative director and occasional editing hand with SWING, a biannual literary magazine published by The Porch. Her rather dusty MFA was earned, long ago, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her work has been supported by the Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Tennessee Arts Commission.
Curiosity is Susannah’s superpower; the natural world is her sanctuary; FIELD TRIP is her delight-driven Substack (sign up below!); crows are her friends; East Nashville is her home sweet home. She also loves a semi-colon.
“Susannah Felts is so emotionally spot-on about the human experience that there is no piece of Maggie’s story that doesn’t resonate.”
—BookPage
“Soaked with nostalgia for an early-aughts Chicago, this rock ’n’ roll novel is as lyrical as the music [Felts] writes about.”
—Chicago Magazine
“Quietly luminous and emotionally precise, The Come Apart builds to a hard- won sense of forward motion. Felts renders artistic life not as myth but as practice: sustained, uncertain, and essential. A moving, clear-eyed, and ultimately affirming novel about grief, persistence, and the necessary act of making something new.”
—Booklist, starred review
Press for The Come Apart
“Susannah Felts on The Come Apart and Creating for Creatives,” in PopMatters, by Alyssa Charpentier
Review in BookPage, by Sydney Hankin
Feature in Chicago Sun-Times, by Selena Fragassi
Feature in NFocus, by Madeleine Bransford
Review in Zona Motel , by Tobias Carroll
Best of Nashville Award 2026 in the Nashville Scene, by Erica Ciccarone
Review in Chapter 16, by Bianca Sass
Feature in Melodic Magazine, by Christine Sloman
Selected Writing
Essays
“In Praise of Slow Writing”
at Incidental Noyes
“A Yellow Thread, or On Obsession” in Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Astonish Me: Anticipating an Eclipse in the Age of Information”
about the 2016 eclipse, from Catapult (later included in BASN 2017)
“Notes on a Christmas Bombing”
about precisely that, at Joyland
“Girl Genius”
about music and raising a daughter and the artists behind the band boygenius, at Longreads
“Girlhood Gone: Notes from the New Nashville”
about watching my hometown change (and changing, myself), in Longreads
“Search and Destroy”
about that time my daughter had lice, at Guernica
“Here are the Things You Should Worry About While Writing a Novel”
about freaking out, at Lit Hub
“If You Want to Write, Here’s the Book for You”
about Brenda Euland’s wisdom, at Lit Hub
Everything I’ve written for Chapter 16
Fiction
“My Friend Louise”
in X-Ray
“Map”
in Smokelong Quarterly
Learn more about the literary arts organization I cofounded:
